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=What Skills Do We Need to Teach Our Students?= = = After identifying where our students stand in relation to the participatory culture and the gaps inherent within that culture, we can now focus on the core media skills we need to teach our students. Henry Jenkins highlights-- core media literacy skills necessary for the 21st century learner (p.4):

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving (Jenkins goes on to highlight the learning that can take place from a young child’s baseball card collection) Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery (Jenkins highlights the benefits of some educational video games whereby participants take on various characters, one such example being that of a girl who took on the role of a loyalists during the American Revolution and its implications for political violence) Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes (Jenkins highlights the learning that can take place through various simulation games) Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content (Jenkins goes on to explain how art does not exist in a vacuum but is something that emerges from previous cultural building blocks and that we need to rethink ownership issues in this new participatory culture) Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details (Jenkins argues that perhaps the youth of today do not have short attention spans but are focusing on several things at once with beneficial aspects to this) Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities (this creates a shift in how we look at intelligence in the sense that it is something that is built instead of simply possessed) Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal (the idea that collectively we are much smarter than in isolation) Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities (think of Hollywood as an example of this where they take a story and turn it into a movie, and then actions figures, trading cards, video games, comic books and a whole franchise emerges) Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information (important implications of this is that students are no longer limited by whether or not they possess large knowledge bases, but on whether they can network to access this knowledge) Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms (as the world gets smaller this becomes crucial)

For a more indepth understanding of these skills an you can read pages 22 to 55 from Henry Jenkins' [|Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century], and open up a discussion to the skills which are most important for our students.

Topic for Discussion
Using the skill sets laid out by Henry Jenkins, what skills are most relevant to teach to our students?

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